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70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation
When the dance begins, they are all onstage together. But they are each very much alone. In the opening vignette of Anna Sokolow’s “Rooms,” there are eight chairs scattered across the stage and eight performers who inhabit them — like city apartments squished so close together yet keeping their occupants apart.
No one makes eye contact. They stare straight ahead. They stand and sit back down. They flop to the side and fold themselves over their thighs. They stretch out horizontally, one leg extending on a diagonal before falling to the floor with a thud. One dancer sets her chin in her palms, her gaze fixed on a corner, as though willing herself to see through a brick wall.
These are people trapped in their own tiny worlds, radiating loneliness, isolation, restlessness, fear, fantasy, desire, distress, panic.
Watching them at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City last month — the day after the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, 13 months into a second Trump administration that has targeted immigrants and transgender people, among others, and in the midst of what former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2023 report deemed “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation” — one could easily imagine “Rooms” was created in 2026. Or during the global pandemic and lockdowns of recent history.
But Sokolow was long gone by the time COVID forced us into our own rooms, physically and socially distant from almost everyone else. She didn’t live to see the tiny screens and tempting apps that would degrade our attention spans and become intermediaries in so many of our conversations. She missed the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots that offer alternatives to human interaction.
Sokolow, who died in 2000 at the age of 90, created “Rooms” seven decades ago, in the wake of a world war and the Holocaust, at a time when polio was rampant, and in the midst of a nuclear arms race and the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1950s.
Yet “Rooms” still feels believable, relatable and unsettling today.
‘An incredible humanity’
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, Sokolow grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City — at the time, the densely packed “capital of Jewish America.” Sokolow’s mother, Sarah, a factory worker, was active in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and was, as Sokolow later described her, “a staunch Socialist.”
Sarah was “angered by the conditions she observed all around her,” writes Sokolow’s biographer, Larry Warren, and kept up with “socialist causes and political activities” by reading Yiddish-language newspapers such as the Forward.
Like her mother, Sokolow looked closely at what was happening around her. She took it all in and put it onstage, Samantha Géracht, artistic director of the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble, told me.
“She walked everywhere,” said Géracht, who was part of the rotation of dancers who accompanied Sokolow to rehearsals when she kept walking everywhere, slowly, into her 80s. “Every shopkeeper, every unhoused person in a doorway, everybody spoke to her, and she spoke to everyone,” Géracht said. “She looked and saw everyone and everything, and she didn’t dismiss any of them.”
Though secular, Sokolow was driven by Jewish values, Hannah Kosstrin, a dance historian at Ohio State University and director of its Melton Center for Jewish Studies, told me over Zoom. “She was most interested in making dances about the underdog,” said Kosstrin, who is also the author of Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow. “About people who were not served by society, people who were unwanted, untouchable, and people who had been through the worst of humanitarian experiences.”
In the 1930s, she made, among other dances, the anti-fascist “Anti-War Trilogy”; “Slaughter of the Innocents,” inspired by the Spanish Civil War; and “The Exile” — which portrayed Jewish life in Europe and the arrival of Nazism. She danced “Kaddish” in 1945 as an “elegy” mourning the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, according to Kosstrin, and later choreographed “Dreams,” which Géracht describes as Sokolow’s “Holocaust nightmares onstage.”
Her work “has an incredible humanity to it,” Kosstrin said.
Kosstrin first encountered Sokolow through a film of “Rooms” as a freshman dance major. “I just remember being absolutely taken with it. It was so intense and so gritty and so real,” she said. “I felt a very particular kind of distress in a way that I had never felt watching dance before,” she added. “That was so incredibly powerful.”
“Rooms,” which had its New York premiere in 1955, was inspired by the Lower East Side tenement houses of Sokolow’s youth. It’s spare — performed with no backdrop, only lighting, chairs, and simple costumes to an original jazz score by the American composer Kenyon Hopkins. Part of its enduring potency is that it could represent any time and any place.
‘I believe you’
Introducing the performance at the museum, Géracht set the scene with one simple instruction. Picture, she told the audience, a building with its facade removed so you could peer into all the apartments and look — really look, as Sokolow would — at the people inside.
In one vignette titled “Going,” a man careens about like he’s just flipped the release valve on his pent-up energy, exploding in big jumps, sliding onto the floor, and snapping his fingers. In “Desire,” six dancers slide their feet back and forth as though caressing the ground. They reach an arm or a leg, as if yearning to entangle their limbs with a lover’s.
In “Escape,” I saw a woman dance with someone who isn’t there. She stands, arms thrown up high, spinning around herself. She flits around the stage. She pulls two chairs to face each other, sits down, and catches the air in an empty embrace. Later, she swipes at each of the chairs in turn and they clatter to the ground.
“She’s very different from me,” dancer Ilana Ruth Cohen told me of the character she embodies in “Escape.” “I do not escape easily, and I don’t tend to look for an escape.” What’s helped, she said, is “remembering the moments I do have where I am drifting or dreaming or imagining being somewhere else, and then trying to use Anna’s movement to expand my experience of those moments.”
There are no prescribed narratives in “Rooms,” just snippets of images and an urgency of emotion that might be read differently by every spectator. That’s OK, Cohen said. “I’m not trying to make sure that the audience knows what my experience is,” she explained. “I’m using my experience to make the movement true, and then the audience has an experience because they’re with me as that’s happening.”
Kosstrin focused her research around the idea of “honest bodies” in part as a way “to highlight Sokolow’s emphasis on believable, raw vulnerability in performance.” As such, Lauren Naslund, an associate artistic director of the ensemble, told me at a recent rehearsal, high praise from Sokolow would be: “You’re doing it in your own way, and I believe you.”
In the vignette “The End?” I saw a woman having a breakdown. Her left hand makes talking motions — thumb to fingers, open and shut — arguing with her right. Her fingers rise toward her ears and wiggle frantically as she extends her arms outward. She steps onto her chair, head tilted back, and flaps her arms like wings in slow motion. Her fragile psyche manifests in movement. She is, perhaps, hearing voices in her head. Feeling her thoughts slip out of her control. Wondering whether she wants to remain in this world.
“Rooms” concludes as it starts, with eight chairs and eight dancers — so close to each other, but still very much alone.
There’s a clip Géracht shows in her lectures with a voiceover from Sokolow speaking on top of footage from “Rooms.” “I don’t end it, because I don’t feel there’s any ending,” Sokolow says. “That’s the Jew in me. Ask the world a question and there’s no answer. All I do is present what I feel and you, you answer.”
‘A kind of beacon’
The Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble was about four weeks away from presenting “Rooms” when the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone home in March 2020 and cleared live performance calendars indefinitely. Suddenly, Géracht said, “we didn’t have to struggle with the idea of how to understand isolation.”
Relegated to their homes like everyone else, the dancers continued working on “Rooms” over Zoom. “You can’t go outside. There’s no classes. There’s no rehearsals. There’s nothing,” remembered dancer Margherita Tisato, who performs the challenging solo “The End?”. “Having a task and having time to dedicate to do this was definitely lifesaving on an emotional level, probably for a lot of us.”
At the same time, she said, “it was asking me to dig more and more deeply into the thing that was, at the moment, really, really hard.” The project provided a creative outlet, but also forced her to grapple with her own feelings of aloneness and isolation.
Eventually, the dancers worked with their rehearsal directors to select the right angles, propped up their computers and phones, and hit record to capture themselves navigating bookcases, coffee tables, cats, and narrow hallways. Naslund edited the footage together to create “Rooms2020,” a COVID-era interpretation of the piece they couldn’t share in person. They later partnered with Madison-based Kanopy Dance to livestream a joint production from Wisconsin and New York, offered virtual workshops to college dance students, and put on a “Rooms” symposium.
“There could not have been a better dance to stage during the pandemic than ‘Rooms’ on video in people’s apartments,” Kosstrin said. Looking back, she said, it offers a social, emotional, and aesthetic window into that moment, with so many stuck in their own bubbles and thrust into each others’ living rooms through tiny squares on their screens.
Géracht said she immersed herself so deeply in “Rooms” that she needed a break before revisiting it again. Although the lockdown experiences are still embedded in the dancers’ bodies and memories, they couldn’t let the work get stuck or stale.
“You don’t want to replicate what you did six years ago,” said Géracht.
“It’s like going on a hike up a really high mountain. Maybe you’ve climbed that mountain,” she said. “You kind of know the way, but you still have to do the whole hike from the bottom to the top.” Every time you do it, “you’re different, the movement’s different, the world is different. And I don’t want the last version you did. I want you now. Which is why we can do the work for so long.”
Géracht is intent on breathing new life into Sokolow’s dances in 2026 and beyond. She wants audiences to experience the “wealth and range” of Sokolow’s work and “understand her genius,” Géracht said, as an artist who “shows us our entire spectrum of human emotion.”
In “Rooms,” Sokolow reminds us, in 2026 as in 2020 as in 1955, what it’s like to crave connection or touch. To conjure a loved one in our mind, only to be startled by the reality of their absence. To get lost in a daydream. To fear what’s outside our control. To feel utterly alone. To be consumed by panic. To fall apart.
Complete, live productions of “Rooms” are somewhat rare. But the ensemble has just confirmed it will perform the piece again at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September. Having seen — and felt — it for myself recently, I hope there will be many more shows to come.
Distressing as it may be to see this “cry of alienation and isolation” reflected back at us right now, Kosstrin said, it could also help us find our way. “We are seeing so many things happen around us that [are] making us question our humanity and other people’s humanity,” she said. Artists like Sokolow, she believes, “can give us a kind of beacon as we try to muddle through these times.”
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
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Primary battle between rabbi and Jewish lawyer is a referendum on Mamdani and buffer zones
(New York Jewish Week) — A primary race on New York’s Upper West Side for a state legislative battle pits a rabbi against a Jewish lawyer in a referendum on where Jews stand on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and on the right to protest outside houses of worship.
Stephanie Ruskay would be the first female rabbi elected to state office in U.S. history. Her opponent is the Mamdani-endorsed Eli Northrup, a public defender and the grandson of a Jewish civil rights lawyer who worked on Supreme Court cases to combat antisemitism and racial segregation in the 1950s.
The hotly contested Democratic primary is for the State Assembly’s District 69, which covers much of the Upper West Side and all of Morningside Heights, including the Columbia University campus roiled in 2024 by pro-Palestinian protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Endorsements tell a story of two New York establishments vying over prime legislative real estate: Mamdani’s Israel-critical progressives facing off against the city’s storied Jewish liberals.
Along with Mamdani’s blessing, Northrup has won prized endorsements from left-wing icons who ran now legendary insurgent campaigns: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose energetic presidential primary run in 2016 helped doom Hillary Clinton’s presidential run; and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose ouster of top Democrat Joseph Crowley in a 2018 primary paved the way for the youthful congressional “Squad.” Mamdani has roiled this election season with endorsements of democratic socialists challenging incumbent congressional Democrats.
Ruskay has been endorsed by leading Jews in New York politics, such as City Council Speaker Julie Menin, City Comptroller Mark Levine, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and former Borough President Ruth Messinger. She also has the backing of ActJew, a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism, and the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel group.
Ruskay and Northrup, who both identify as progressives, are battling in a neighborhood where nearly one-third of households are Jewish. The Assembly seat opened in the fall when current Assembly member Micah Lasher, who is also Jewish, decided to run for Congress.
The district overwhelmingly supported Mamdani in the 2025 mayoral race, when his sharp criticism of Israel broke with the city’s Democratic establishment and fomented ongoing tensions with segments of the Jewish community.
Northrup is a full-throated supporter of the mayor who volunteered for his campaign. Ruskay has voiced more tepid views on Mamdani, acknowledging that many Jewish New Yorkers disagreed with his views about Israel.
“When we agree, I’ll be very excited to work together, and when we don’t agree or when I know that I represent people who have a very different perspective from what’s happening, then my job is to bring that into the room,” Ruskay told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in December.
Ruskay joined New York’s annual Israel Day Parade in May, which Mamdani skipped. She said on X that she was “proud” to attend the gathering, which she described as a reminder of “the deep bonds between New York’s Jewish community and Israel, and of the strength, resilience, and vibrancy of Jewish life.”
Northrup has resisted the long tradition among Jewish Democrats of identifying as a Zionist. “I don’t know that it’s serving us to be categorizing people as Zionist or anti-Zionist,” he told JTA last month. “I certainly don’t see myself in those terms.”
Both candidates have cited their faith and Jewish values as driving their politics. They agree on building more affordable housing, filling the district’s many vacant storefronts, supporting unions and enforcing labor laws. Both have also voiced their commitment to fighting President Donald Trump and his crackdown on immigration.
One of their rare areas of disagreement is the fight over “buffer zones” to insulate synagogues from protests, a flashpoint in New York politics. The city and state both recently passed legislation that restricts demonstrations outside houses of worship. Some Jewish leaders and lawmakers championed the measures in the aftermath of a string of pro-Palestinian rallies outside synagogues, which were hosting events that promoted migration to Israel and real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank.
Ruskay supports the buffer zones. She has argued they are necessary to protect Jews from intimidation, saying during a candidate forum in May, “In the world as we wish it was, I don’t think that you should have [to] have a buffer zone. But in the world that we actually live in right now, I think that we do need one.”
Northrup, meanwhile, said in the forum that outlawing protest within a certain distance of an institution “wouldn’t pass constitutional muster,” citing Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He told JTA that buffer zones were more symbolic than effective in addressing rising antisemitism, and that he instead supported multifaith education and building alliances across communities.
Various civil rights groups and Jewish progressives, such as Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, have said that buffer zone laws infringe on free speech and assembly. JFREJ has endorsed Northrup.
Northrup’s skepticism of the laws aligns with Mamdani’s views. The mayor resisted signing the City Council’s buffer zone bill pertaining to houses of worship, though it became law with a veto-proof majority, and he vetoed a separate bill implementing buffer zones around schools.
Ruskay has received $25,000 from the American Centerpoint PAC, which was formed on June 11, according to City and State. The PAC’s sole contributor was Adeena Rosen, a key figure in the Solidarity PAC that boosted pro-Israel candidates in 2024 state races.
In a race lacking publicly available polls, fundraising is a significant indicator. The candidates were neck-and-neck in fundraising on Election Day, with Ruskay gathering $436,381 and Northrup raising $443,522, according to Transparency USA.
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